San Francisco -- Red Giant Universe, a revolutionary new community with access to an ever-expanding library of new tools and effects for filmmakers and motion graphic artists, is now available. Membership in Red Giant Universe is free and it allows members to take control of the future of Universe development. Available now are 50 Free and Premium visual effects plugins built on a brand-new platform, Supernova. Red Giant Universe is available at redgiant.com/universe for $10/month, $99/year or $399 for a lifetime license.

“Universe is a completely new platform for Red Giant and the culmination of nearly two years of work building a new architecture,” said Sean Safreed, co-founder and lead visionary behind Universe. “The Red Giant team has put together an amazing set of 50 fast and useful effects using Supernova, our new development engine. This really is the future of visual effects development for us and the filmmaking community.”

Free membership includes the use of 31 effects and transitions, including blurs, glows, distortion, generators and 3D transitions. Stand-out tools in our free membership include beautiful transitions such as Swish Pan and 3D Shutter as well as the unique Glo-Fi that creates pulsating, multi-hued glows for titling. These tools are truly free and NEVER expire. Premium membership includes access to 19 tools. The Premium tools include updated favorites such as Knoll Light Factory EZ, Holomatrix, ToonIt (powered by Toonamation), and Retrograde, from CrumplePop and Red Giant.

Universe at a Glance
Red Giant Universe is a community with access to an ever-expanding library of new free tools for filmmakers, editors, VFX artists and motion designers. Universe includes:

Tons of new GPU-accelerated effects and transitions.

31 free tools (22 Effects & 9 Transitions)

19 premium tools (12 Effects & 7 Transitions)

Regularly updated (using our developer tool Supernova)

Porting of some existing Red Giant products to Universe (Premium)

Voting on new tools to decide what gets made next

Invitations to private betas for new tools (Premium)

"The new Universe toolset is so blazing fast, interactions with the parameters are instantaneous, even on my MacBook Pro," said Joey Morelli, owner of DigiDojo, and a veteran editor and compositor. "It's actually fun to play around and get instant feedback. And the effects are SWEET! The new version of Universe Holomatrix is worth the price of admission alone. I cannot wait for future updates!"

Red Giant Universe community is now open on the web as well with its first feature called Labs. Labs lets members vote on the amazing visual effects that they want to see next. The tool that wins the Labs voting round goes right into Universe and is available as part of the Universe membership. Red Giant is committed to frequent updates throughout the year. Members will receive dozens of new tools in 2014 alone.

Built on a new platform called Supernova, Red Giant Universe is able to deliver tools faster than any other platform on the planet. The secret is a simple scripting system uniting the power of Javascript and a GPU framework to allow our developers to fulfill the desires of our community in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks.

All the tools in Red Giant Universe exploit the power of modern GPU (graphics processing unit) to render most effects in near real-time. The platform is also scalable, working across small and light laptops such as Macbook Air with modern Intel graphics processors (HD4000 and later) up to high-end workstation GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. All effects render with floating point quality for feature film-ready output.

Red Giant Universe is available today as a subscription for $10/month or as a discounted yearly pre-pay for $99. Users who want the benefits of membership but don’t want to pay monthly can opt for a lifetime membership for $399. The lifetime membership never expires and includes all Universe updates and upgrades released over the months and years to come. All Red Giant Universe tools and effects work in After Effects (CS 5.5, CS6, and CC), Premiere Pro (CS6 and CC), Final Cut Pro X (10.1.1) and Motion (5.1), and work on both Mac OS X (10.8.4 and later) and Windows 7 (64-bit) and Windows 8.1.